Question by τεκνον θεου: How to set up a mac computer network for an arts department at an elementary school?
I would like to set up a computer lab of 8-10 mac computers that will serve approximately 180 students. Each student will maintain (with help, obviously) a portfolio of work done in art and music class. Therefore, I would like each student to have her own login ID and folder. Since the files will be audio and pictures, storage needs are high.
I will administer the network. I have mac experience, but I am not a sysadmin by any means. I can learn quickly and I am tech savvy, but I hold no illusions of becoming a Unix guru during this school year. The school will be able to get support for installation but I will need to run the thing myself.
Any ideas for hardware/software configurations are welcome. The workstations will likely be mac minis, other than that budget is not a huge issue.
Best answer:
Answer by Icy M
All you’ll probably need will be your Macs, an Apple Airport Base Station, and a Server with Mac OS X server to hold all the files and accounts. You’ll have to make every student’s account 1 by 1, as far as I know.
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What you are trying to do is great, you sound like a wonderful teacher. What you are trying to do might be over your head though. You are probably going to need at least a 500gb server and a network (I wouldn’t recommend wireless). Setting it up will be difficult and expensive, check with your district’s tech department to see what they can do.
They did this same thing at my high school, but our digital art teacher raised the bar. We have the same system you described and it works perfectly. The tutorials he makes are a sure fire way to get students to learn quickly. http://maclab.guhsd.net
Another essential program to have is apples remote desktop, it will help you endlessly.
good luck.